NR 640B Week 5 Priorities Brief Example

Department Priorities Brief: Live Informatics Projects in Order of Weight, the Nursing Optimization Queue of 64 Requests and the Work the Team Wants but Cannot Start

Student Name

College of Nursing, Chamberlain University

NR 640B: Informatics Nurse Specialist Practicum I

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Department Priorities Brief: Live Informatics Projects in Order of Weight, the Nursing Optimization Queue of 64 Requests and the Work the Team Wants but Cannot Start

Sources

The informatics project list on the shared drive, as of 1 October 2026; an export of the nursing optimization queue from the service portal on 2 October; minutes of the September and October optimization meetings; the chief nursing informatics officer's annual plan for fiscal year 2027; and conversations with the preceptor on 29 September and 6 October.

Part 1: Live Work, in Order of Weight

Weight here means the share of the team's hours. By the preceptor's estimate, the upgrade and pump integration together take about 60% of build and testing time between now and March (source: preceptor, 6 October).

Part 2: The Optimization Queue

On 2 October the nursing queue held 64 open requests. By type: flowsheet changes, 22; worklist and task changes, 11; reports, 8; order set changes, 9; alerts, 7; other, 7. The oldest was 14 months old; the median age was five months (source: portal export).

Typical items: carrying forward fall-risk answers; adding a wound photograph link to the wound flowsheet; removing a duplicate pain reassessment row on one unit's flowsheet; a report of overdue Braden assessments.

Over the past six months, the monthly optimization meeting approved an average of six nursing items a month for build, while about ten new ones arrived each month (source: meeting minutes, April to September). The queue is growing.

A practicum-sized idea belongs here: something small, that the queue already contains or would accept, and that a student could support with analysis rather than build.

Part 3: What the Team Says It Wants Next

The annual plan names documentation burden reduction for nurses as the top nursing informatics goal for fiscal 2027, with a target of reviewing the adult admission history (source: annual plan, page 3). The preceptor said the admission history, which nurses complete on every adult admission, contains many fields that duplicate pharmacy's medication history and the provider's history and physical.

Why it has not started: staffing and the freeze. Through March the specialists have no spare hours, since the vendor upgrade and pump integration take them; the admission history review would need about 80 hours of analysis before any build decision, and nobody has those hours (source: preceptor, 6 October). Nobody doubts its value.

Where the Lists Disagree

The annual plan puts documentation burden first. The queue ranking does not. Of the 36 nursing items approved in six months, five reduced documentation; most were safety or regulatory changes. The preceptor's explanation was that each burden item is small and loses to safety in a straight ranking. Published work suggests documentation burden is linked to burnout among nurses (Gesner et al., 2022), and that measuring it is itself difficult, with studies using many different methods (Moy et al., 2021). The department has no measure of burden at present, which makes it harder for burden items to compete.

The Calendar the Department Works To

Any practicum idea for next term has to work within that calendar, which leaves almost no build time before April.

Who Was Asked, and What They Said

The preceptor and, briefly, the chief nursing informatics officer after the October meeting. The officer agreed that the admission history review was the top documentation goal and said it would start "when someone has the hours." Neither suggested a student could do the build; both said analysis would help.

What This Means for the Practicum

A practicum idea that supports the admission history review with analysis, without needing build hours before March, fits the department's stated priority and its real constraints. The boundary memo in week 7 will set out such an idea.

Claims Without Sources

None knowingly. Where a figure is the preceptor's estimate rather than a count from a document, it is labeled as an estimate, and the portal export and meeting minutes are kept on the shared drive so the counts can be rechecked. Estimates of time and hours are the preceptor's and are labeled as such.

What the Queue Says About Nursing Needs

Reading the 64 requests one by one shows a pattern the counts hide. About a third ask the record to remember something the nurse has already entered, such as carrying forward an answer or pulling a value into a summary. Another group asks for fewer clicks to reach a screen nurses use every shift. Very few ask for new content. In other words, the queue is mostly a list of documentation burden items, even though they are rarely labeled that way when they are ranked.

Limits

The queue export does not show requests that were closed without being built, so it cannot show how many ideas were refused. The annual plan is a draft and may change at the November leadership retreat, in which case the brief's conclusion about where a practicum idea fits would need checking again.

Fit With Published Evaluation Thinking

Choosing work from what the organization has said it needs, rather than from what interests the student, reflects the organizational dimension of evaluating health information systems (Yusof et al., 2008).

References

Gesner, E., Dykes, P. C., Zhang, L., & Gazarian, P. (2022). Documentation burden in nursing and its role in clinician burnout syndrome. Applied Clinical Informatics, 13(5), 983-990. https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0042-1757157

Moy, A. J., Schwartz, J. M., Chen, R., Sadri, S., Lucas, E., Cato, K. D., & Rossetti, S. C. (2021). Measurement of clinical documentation burden among physicians and nurses using electronic health records: A scoping review. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 28(5), 998-1008. https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocaa325

Yusof, M. M., Kuljis, J., Papazafeiropoulou, A., & Stergioulas, L. K. (2008). An evaluation framework for health information systems: Human, organization and technology-fit factors (HOT-fit). International Journal of Medical Informatics, 77(6), 386-398. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2007.08.011